The Verse - Zywiec | Clapboard Ad Archive
Zywiec’s 2014 activation for Poland’s Male Music festival, developed by Gong agency, captured the potent intersection of music, technology, and participatory culture in the recreation and leisure sector, putting the brand at the heart of a digital engagement wave with The Verse campaign. Centered on a purpose-built online platform, The Verse invited users to rewrite the lyrics to Electrical — a high-profile track performed by leading Polish rock artists — and experience their personalized verses being sung and rendered as custom music videos. Zywiec’s approach bypassed conventional storytelling and instead engineered a distinctive, ownable mechanic: an interactive, algorithmic tool that enabled half a million festival fans and music lovers to step into the creative process, not just as listeners but as lyricists whose contributions were validated by tangible output. More than 150,000 user-generated videos flowed from this mechanic, exemplifying what Clapboard’s taxonomy would categorize as FORMAT#11 UNIQUE PERSONALITY PROPERTY, making a creative idea inseparable from the product experience and thus the brand itself. In partnership with Gong, Zywiec managed to propel both user creativity and social sharing, leveraging Poland’s vibrant festival audience to create a self-reinforcing engine of advocacy and reach. The creative avoided the pitfalls of testimonial or dramatized narrative formats, instead foregrounding participation at scale and melding professional artistry from the country’s top rock musicians with the voice of the crowd — a direct expression of the festival’s ethos. Not only did this strengthen Zywiec’s status as an engaged festival sponsor, but it also reinforced its cultural credibility in a category where emotional resonance and social capital are core value drivers. The campaign’s digital structure made Zywiec omnipresent across user channels and touchpoints, riding the virality inherent in music and peer-to-peer sharing, while deepening audience affinity by making every participant a creator with real output to show and share. For the market category, this is a demonstration of how digital innovation and personalized creative formats can deliver mass engagement without sacrificing a sense of authenticity or tangibility for the brand. The campaign earns 72/100 in Clapboard’s global creative archive. Zywiec’s The Verse matters because by transforming fans into co-creators through digital craft, the brand models a participative future for experiential sponsorship in the leisure industry.
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